What Caught My Eye forOctober 1 - 14 (#31)

These three countries are unlikely to live with each other in peace. Israel and Turkey are already at loggerheads in Syria. Israel and Iran have unfinished business over the war. Iran and Turkey are ancient imperial rivals.

The losers are the Arab states. Countries such as Iraq and Syria are still struggling to emerge from the ashes of civil war. Egypt, once the natural leader of the Arab world, devotes its energy to corruption and crushing opposition at home. The Gulf monarchies have embraced a prosperity agenda that seeks to anaesthetise ideology with economic growth. That is welcome, but their business model depends on American security. The rivalries of ultra-rich Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are radiating instability—perhaps America’s parting gift could be to help them work together.

The midterm results will do little to change the way Trump has made the federal government his personal weapon; but attitudes leading up to these elections indicate that voters have a hunger for calling a spade a spade. It’s a cousin to Tim Walz’s 2024 strategy of calling Republicans “weird”—except this time we’re calling them desperate clowns.

The GOP can’t win on truth, so they just spread utter bullshit with no basis in reality whatsoever.

A panel asking if the US was a FIMI (Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference) threat was interfered with by the US State Department. You can’t make this shit up.

Bolsonaro has promised that he’d make his country a member of SoA if he were to win, which would be an alarming development for fans of democracy and human rights in South America. That’s but one of many reasons to pay very close attention to what’s happening in Brazil over the next month. The presidential election is extremely important—I recommend this recent symposium from North South Notes for even more context—not just for Brazil and for the region, but for the future of life on Earth. Under Lula, deforestation of the Amazon slowed drastically. Under Bolsonaro, it would surely surge, especially given the centrality of agriculture to his campaign. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

I am so fucking sick of these chumps. I’m sick of every victory notched by the Democrats being a fleeting one. Right now, Donald Trump is an historically unpopular president, and he has made the party he rules over equally despised. During Trump’s second term in office, he has destroyed this nation’s preventive healthcare infrastructure, wiped out entire fields of scientific research, unleashed a fascist police force on American cities, started an insane war, murdered dozens of people in cold blood, desecrated the national park system, fucked up the Reflecting Pool, and literally torn down the White House itself. Every oval that Americans fill in on the D side of a ballot this fall is them saying “Fuck Donald Trump” as loudly and clearly as possible. And Hakeem Jeffries wants to check his swing if he dares to utter it himself? Sit on a gavel, you fucking clown.

The Democrats could get a filibuster and veto proof majority and still fuck it up. Schumer and Jeffries must go.

So if they wrest control of Congress a month from now, their priority won’t be to reform a brazenly corrupt Supreme Court, or to punish Trump and his many accomplices for their endless crimes, or to finally cut off aid to Israel, or even to force an end to that shitty war in Iran. All they’ll do is sit on their candy asses and wait around for the next election. Then they’ll tell you the best way, the most responsible way, to express your anger at their indifference is to continue voting for them.